Monday, November 20, 2017

Janesville - a town that explains Trump and also why you shouldn't judge or blame people for being poor

You’re put in a town that implodes when the car plant closes
down and 9000 people lose their jobs. GM was a mess – incompetent management,
old models, a company that failed to innovate. As if that wasn’t enough
Janesville is hit with Biblical levels of rain (climate change?). Journalism at
its best, by a Poulitzer-winning writer, written from the perspective of the
people affected. Want to know why working America is pissed? Read this book.
Told with compassion but realism, through the lives of real people in a real
town.

For over 100 years they had produced tractors, pick-ups,
trucks, artillery shells and cars. Obama came and went, the financial crisis
hammered them deeper into the dirt but while the banks were bailed by the
state, the state bailed on the people. On top of this a second large, local
employer, Parker Pens, outsourced to Mexico but the market for upmarket pens
was also dying. The ignominy of being asked to extend your wages by a few weeks
by going down to Mexico to train their cheaper labour was downright evil.

Then the adjunct businesses started to fail, the suppliers,
trades, shops, restaurants, nurseries for two income families – then the
mortgage and rent arrears, foreclosures, house prices fall, negative equity. As
middle-class jobs go they push down on working lass jobs and the poor get
poorer.

“Family is more important than GM” this is the line that
resonated most with me in the book. In this age of identity politics, most
people still see a stable family and their community as their backstops. The
left and right have lost focus on this. The community didn’t lie down – they
fought for grants, did lots themselves to raise money, help each other – but it
was not enough.

Grants for retraining were badly targeted, training people
for reinvention is difficult for monolithic, manufacturing workforces. Some of
it was clearly hopeless, like discredited Learning Style diagnosis, overlong courses
of limited relevance to the workplace or practice. Problems included the fact
that many couldn’t use computers, so there was huge drop out, more debts and
little in the way of workplace learning. Those that did full degrees found that
what few jobs there were had been snapped up while they were in college – their
wages dropped the most, by nearly half. One thing did surprise me, the curious
offshoot that was anti-teacher hostility. People felt let down by a system that
doesn’t really seem to work and saw teachers as having great holidays, pensions
and healthcare, while they were thrown out of work. The whole separation of
educational institutions from workplaces seems odd.

Jobs didn’t materialise. What jobs there are, exist in the
public sector – in welfare charities and jails. A start-up provided few jobs,
many commuted like gypsies to distant factories. Even for those in work, there
was a massive squeeze on wages, in some cases a 50% cut, sometimes more. In the
end jobs came back but real wages fell. Healthcare starts to become a stretch. But
it’s the shame of poverty, using food banks, homeless teenagers and a real-life
tragedy 200 pages into the book that really shakes you over.

The book ends with the divide between the winners and
losers. This is the divide that has shattered America. Janesville is the bit of
America tourists, along with East and West coast liberals don’t see. The
precariat are good people who are having bad things done to them by a system
that shoves money upwards into the pockets of the rich. Looked down upon by
Liberals, they are losing faith in politics, employers, the media, even
education.

Wisconsin turned Republican and Trump was elected. The
economist Mark Blyth attributes the Trump win to their wages squeeze and fall in
expectations, even hope. People got a whole lot poorer and don’t see a great
future for their kids.

A more relevant piece of work than Hillbilly Elegy, with which it is being compared. Final thought
–why are journalists in the UK not doing this? Answer – they’re bubble-wrapped
in their cozy London lairs, part of the problem and too lazy to get out and do
their jobs… writing the same stories about why they don’t like social media,
failing to see that they are the purveyors, not so much of fake new but
inauthentic news, irrelevant news, news reduced to reporting on shadows within
their own epistemological cave… one exception - John Harris.

1 Comments:

I grew up in Janesville; my parents still live there. I haven't read this book, although I am curious and may do so.

Janesville has always been fairly mixed with Democrats and Republicans. The city is actually probably slightly left-leaning these days (that why they gerrymandered Paul Ryan's district to include more areas outside Janesville and protect him).

I think that the Democrats haven't done a good job understanding how people in communities like Janesville have been affected by economic changes. Democratic policies would actually help communities like Janesville, but they haven't gotten that message out in a way that resonates enough.